Posts by Lynn Webster, M.D.
My Forthcoming Book: Deconstructing Toxic Narratives
I’m very pleased to share the cover of my forthcoming book, Deconstructing Toxic Narratives: Data, Disparities, and a New Path Forward in the Opioid Crisis. I wrote this book because the public conversation about the opioid crisis has too often been shaped by oversimplification. The crisis cannot be understood through blame alone. It is also a…
Read MoreBill Expands Pain Care Options and Lowers Cost for Medicare Patients
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on Pain News Network on March 7, 2026. Everyone who reads this publication understands chronic pain is often treated as a symptom. However, for tens of millions of Americans, it is a disease state. It reshapes the nervous system, erodes function, and can narrow life…
Read MoreWhen Coverage Gets Cut, Overdoses Increase
Image by Dee from Pixabay This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on American Council on Science and Health on February 9, 2025. When health insurance becomes conditional and unaffordable, it doesn’t just disappear from balance sheets—it vanishes from people’s lives at the moment they need it most. The expiration of enhanced ACA Marketplace subsidies…
Read MoreLong-Term Pain Therapy With Opioids
JAMA Letter by Dr. Lynn Webster This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared online in JAMA on December 18, 2025. Long-Term Pain Therapy With Opioids To the Editor The Viewpoint by Drs. Bicket and Bateman highlights the asymmetry between abundant data on opioid-related harms and the scarcity of evidence regarding benefits of long-term opioid…
Read MoreCannabinoids and Pain Care: A Federal Shift That Needs Guardrails
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on Pain News Network on December 20, 2025. On December 18, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to expedite completion of the process moving marijuana from an illegal Schedule I controlled substance to Schedule III, a less restrictive category that…
Read MoreHow the CDC Caught the Political Virus
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on American Council on Science and Health on December 11, 2025 It is the second in a two-part series examining the CDC’s revised autism–vaccine messaging and the broader politicization of CDC science. While Part 1 focused on the November 19, 2025 change to the CDC’s “Autism…
Read MoreA War on Drugs That Bombs Boats, Pardons ‘Narco-State’ President, and Prosecutes Doctors
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on Pain News Network on December 6, 2025. On September 1, 2025, a U.S. warplane blew apart a small speedboat in the Caribbean, killing all eleven people on board. President Trump released the video like a trailer for a new season of a drug…
Read MoreVaccines, Autism, and a CDC That Blinked. Part 1.
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on American Council on Science and Health on December 4, 2025. This essay examines how recent political intervention has reshaped the CDC’s public messaging on vaccines and autism. In Part 1, I explain why the scientific evidence on this topic has not changed—and why the…
Read MoreThe PAIN GAME: How We Criminalize Medicine
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on Pain News Network on November 20, 2025. “What happened?” It’s the most basic question you can ask about the opioid crisis. Yet for more than two decades, most of the answers the public has been given have been pre-packaged: greedy drug companies, corrupt “pill mill”…
Read MoreWhere Pain Research Is Headed and Why I’m Hopeful
This article, in a slightly edited form, first appeared on Pain News Network on October 18, 2025. If you live with pain, you’ve probably heard promises that “something better is coming.” At this month’s Pain Therapeutics Summit in San Diego, you could see that promise taking shape. For two days, clinicians, scientists, companies and…
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